How not to be pastoral

You could say that was the mistake that the Episcopal Church made.  Starting in the 1970s its leaders said that in order to heal the hurts of the same-sex attracted (SSA) we must let them live out their sexual desires.  Later, that meant marriage for gays.

It didn’t matter, for TEC, that the plain sense of Scripture and the whole Christian tradition were against these moves.  Scripture makes plain that “from the beginning God made them male and female” (Matt 19.4) and the emerging catholic tradition taught that SSA is “disordered.”

But TEC leaders were convinced that certain new findings of the social sciences—contradicting a previous consensus in the social sciences—showed that the biblical authors and Church tradition were benighted.  If only they knew what was now being revealed about human nature, they would see that the SSA were made that way by God and thus deserved the same sexual freedom that heterosexuals supposedly enjoyed.

This was an appropriate pastoral response, TEC said, because it is our calling as Christian ministers of the gospel to bring compassion to those in pain.

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